Beyond nurturing and facilitating a life for our growing children, whatever ideas we may have on this, there is something else to consider.
We may have planned a family, but it is worth remembering every child comes as a unique bundle of energy that does not belong to us, any more than we can say our own energy belongs to us. Our core consciousness just is, and their core consciousness just is too.
They come through us for our loving, not our keeping.
Loving our children , beyond nurture and facilitating, means creating a space around them for them to grow in, to get to know themselves and grow in their own expression of energy, whether we like it or not. Whether anyone else likes it or not.
If we give them any other message than this it is has ceased to be a loving message and is now a message of the stress of the parent that is being communicated, and the stress of the parent’s environment.
“You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls live in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit,
Not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.”
When we impose our thinking on our children this often leads to misunderstanding and anxiety for all concerned. If we act on our intuition, and release our own often conditioned thinking on parenting, then our children do not become a focus for our own purpose and meaning in life. They are here to leave their own energetic footprint, facilitated by our love, not our stress. We are then free to be curious around our own creative use of personal energy beyond what is required of us in parenting our children.
Beyond a certain age, what our children need from us is our own authentic creative expression. They need to get to know who we are.
This is because we have become the role model for their evolving lives.
How?
By freely expressing our truth and our talents, and encouraging them to show theirs.
By not being afraid to be seen to be vulnerable, it gives our children permission to draw closer to us, and creates space for them to show their vulnerability too.
We do this by allowing our emotional selves to become known to them, and by taking personal responsibility around our emotions. This in turn allows them, our children, free expression of emotions and reinforces their own personal responsibility in an unconditionally loving atmosphere.
Release the need to be a perfectionist, or a rigid thinker. You will put distance between you and your child if you don’t, because love is a free exchange of energy and is unconditional.
Release all perception of lack in yourself. There is nothing wrong with you. You are a human being making her way through life as best you can. Give yourself a break.
By doing this you enable your child to do the same for herself too.
Release all unworkable patterns in your dealings with others, this enables your child to do the same for himself in his encounters with others in his young life.
See through your resistance to want to do this for yourself. You are being too hard on yourself and it benefits no-one that you are not being the best expression of yourself that you can be.
This allows your child to see through his own resistance to want to nurture himself this way too.
Accept that we cannot battle with nature, only embrace what nature is telling us. We only go into battle with ourselves if we don’t do this for ourselves and risk manifesting illness.
By doing this we set up a pattern for health for our children, now and for their future lives. We are showing them what it is to take personal responsibility around what really matters, regardless of what others may say. Others who do not like this are expressing their own stress.
Accept that making mistakes is essential for our enlightened passage through the world.
Falling down and choosing to get up again is empowering , no matter what anyone else may say.
When our children see we are doing this for ourselves, we are being the best role model we can be, because we will be showing our children a way forward that works ,because it is gentle, kind, responsible, rational, reasonable, enabling, creative, and refers them to their own intuitive responses and is therefore empowering. From here we gain their respect without feeling the need to demand it. The need to demand respect reveals parental stress.
Above all they will know you are on their side by how they are feeling when they are with you.
They will know they are loved unconditionally, and you will know you are loved unconditionally too in the exchange and flow of energy passing between you. This never goes away, no matter the physical distance or distance in time. Love may change form, but will never be destroyed. It is not physically possible.
“You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the Archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He also loves the bow that is stable”.
The Prophet
Kahlil Gibran